Eric and Dennis discuss commercial pools and the common issues Dennis has observed in them over the last several decades. Dennis shares how Orenda products and the app have helped him and his customers in the field.
00:00 - Brief introduction
00:41 - CV-600's eye-opening results in commercial pools
03:34 - Filter purge
05:59 - Scale issues
07:19 - Phosphates
10:54 - UV
12:20 - LSI in commercial pools
14:36 - pH and alkalinity, overdosing acid feeders
19:24 - Closing
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126. Commercial Pools (w/ Dennis Ingram)
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Welcome back to the rule your pool podcast. This is episode 126. If you hear the noise of my pool in the backyard and the birds tweeting, we are outdoor again. We're actually recording it right after last week's episode. I'm still sitting here with our special guest, Dennis Ingram. Thank you so much for being back on the show.
[00:00:17] Dennis Ingram: All right. Glad to be here.
CV-600 has eye-opening results
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[00:00:19] Eric Knight: So in the last episode, we talked about indoor air quality and chloramines. And now we're going to talk about commercial pool operation and the things that you've seen in the field. Cause nobody calls you when everything's perfect, right? It's kind of like us. People only call us when there's a problem.
[00:00:55] They call Dennis when S hits the fan. And either something's broken, they need to fix it immediately, and he's driving at 11 at night. I know you've done these kind of calls. You get up at two in the morning to go fix a problem somewhere that's three hours away. Talk about your experience of what kind of problems you see in commercial pools. And what you have done in the past few years and modified how you address them.
[00:01:19] Dennis Ingram: Well. That's a loaded question. I know, you can actually say, well I've seen it all. And it seems like you have sometimes. And then you go out on a new call and you haven't.
[00:01:29] So, uh, Orenda, that's, was an eye opener there that you introduced me to. Where we actually do filter purges and stuff like that. As far as indoor air quality, to top off on that, I really think Orenda can help with that as well because it seems that you use less chlorine because when you use Orenda, the CV600 enzymes, it frees chlorine up to do what it's supposed to do. So therefore you're not tonning the chlorine into the pool because the Orenda is handling all the organics and stuff like that. It eats all the organics.
[00:02:01] So basically all the chlorine has to do then is kill the viruses and bacteria and stuff like that. So you're not using near as much chlorine. To me, it's a game changer. It blew me away. Uh, especially when it came to, we come in and did those filter purges. That was amazing.
[00:02:17] Eric Knight: At the YMCA?
[00:02:18] Dennis Ingram: Yeah. We did. Well, we do two of them. And we did that one. Then we went down to, uh, upstate. Yep. And did that one. And it, it actually freed, that was the automated filter and they were having issues and we were about to change it over to a manual. And it actually started working again. So it was like it ate the stuff off of the cylinders where it started working the valves and all that. It actually started working again. So, um, it was very eye opening to me. And I've been a believer in the product since.
[00:02:47] I don't sell stuff unless I believe in it, you know, or I've tried it myself. And I put a lot of it out there with customers, especially outdoor pools. It's absolutely amazing what it does, it works very well in indoor pools because those, those that we did there were indoor pools, so, but very good product.
[00:03:07] A lot of times, I mean, I see people that, you can tell people that take care of their pools and keep their chemicals balanced or not. I've gone into pools that are 15, 18 years old, still have the original plaster and look great. You know, other than normal wear. And then I've gone in the pools that are six months old and they look like they're 15 years old, you know. It's just a matter of the, uh, facility operator maintaining the chemicals like they should.
Filter cleaning
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[00:03:34] Eric Knight: What are you seeing in terms of pump rooms? Let's get out of the pool for a second. Let's get into the pump rooms. Because I see so much damage in the pump rooms, not only from rust, which we know is from fumes from things like acid, and sometimes chlorine as well. Um, what are you seeing in terms of errors that can be prevented?
[00:03:53] If you've got a commercial operator listening to this, and we do have several of them, they've been reaching out. What advice would you have for a commercial operator to either call, take a photo of, whatever. What are the common issues that you are seeing in pump rooms most often?
[00:04:08] Dennis Ingram: Uh, maintenance. Uh, and it's the pool, it's the pump room, it's everything. They will put together money and build a beautiful facility. And then they have no money for maintenance.
[00:04:22] I see leaks that no one addresses, and it gets the point where it's just you get there and it's caused more damage than if they would have went ahead and addressed it at the beginning.
[00:04:34] Um, they let sand go too long, you know, without changing the sand filter. So they wait till they have issues and then they want it done, you know, and it takes a little while to put together a sand change most of the time, especially on the very big filters like we deal with.
[00:04:50] Eric Knight: And how effective has the filter purge been at mitigating a sand change?
[00:04:56] Dennis Ingram: It definitely increases your time. And if they were using, there's times I'm wondering if you would ever even have to do a sand change because it does clean the sand that well. Uh, you go in there and do these purges and, and it, it, it's almost like having new sand. It just cleans all the organics and stuff, yeah, that's just stuck on the sand. It'll actually clean it out, flush it out. And it does very well.
[00:05:21] I know it would definitely extend the life of the sand. It's, like I said, again, it's a great product. I was trying to come up with a number in my head, how many we have done, and, what it's done. But, um, gosh...
[00:05:36] Eric Knight: It's a lot.
[00:05:36] Dennis Ingram: Yeah, I mean, we go in there and put the stuff in and we've designed a couple of little tools where we aerate the sand, you know, so it can get down into it and really clean. And then we let it sit for four hours or so and then go in there and backwash it out.
[00:05:49] And I mean, it's like, wow. It does great. You know, the pressures and all come back around and you just see a huge difference in it.
Scale issues
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[00:05:59] Eric Knight: Are you seeing a lot of scale issues on pools?
[00:06:03] Dennis Ingram: Well you'll see it in heaters a lot of times. We've seen some recently. Uh, but you'll see it on like the gutters, uh, around the edges of the pool. You'll see build up. And you'll see it in the filters. Um, Especially vac sands, you know, because it's open. It's anywhere in the feeders, you know, you'll see it building up to the point of you have to replace parts and stuff on the feeders.
[00:06:27] Eric Knight: I'm trying to think, now that you're saying that, because I know you guys primarily deal with Accutab, Calhypo, uh, we should try a pool and see if we can get the scale cleaned up. I bet we could. If we dose it slow enough that it doesn't zero the chlorine. That'd be a good experiment to do. Because we, I don't think we've done that. We've done it with outdoor pools. I know we've done it with Starclaire and a few of Jeff's pools. But I don't think we've done it with a Cal Hypo pool locally.
[00:06:53] Now, there are commercial dealers all over the country who have, but I don't think we've done one. We focused on enzymes and filter purges mostly.
[00:06:59] Dennis Ingram: We've had our plaster guys use it at the startup. And, you know, which it takes a while to get the chlorine built back up after they run it because they put it in there and it, you know, to keep anything from staining new plaster.
[00:07:10] But that's about the only stuff that we've done with is on brand new pools. Um, but we got some, we can do it.
Phosphates
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[00:07:19] Eric Knight: Well, I remember a lot of the footage that we've used for Commercial Academy, which is not out yet, but it's close. Finally, it's a lot of work. But the Commercial Academy, a lot of the footage that we've used have been in pump rooms with Dennis.
[00:07:32] And he's not in the footage, but, um, like one of the YMCA's we went to was, remember when you called and said, we used PR-10,000 and it's everywhere. We went down in South Carolina and had to vacuum it real slow with those separate pumps. It had that DE filter.
[00:07:47] I mean, I don't know how much PR you used, but it fell out so much that you could barely see the black tile lines for the lanes at the bottom of the pool. It snowed the entire pool. And, you know, we're talking a YMCA pool with like eight lanes and this dust was everywhere and it was thick. So I guess they'd never done a phosphate treatment before.
[00:08:07] Dennis Ingram: But I've done it before at an outdoor pool and it did great and it did exactly what I told the guy I was going to do. You know, he put it in there. I wasn't there to see him vacuum it out. I told him, I said, this thing's going to look like a bowl of milk when you get through.
[00:08:20] I said, and give it three days. The third day you walk up, it's going to look like it snowed on the bottom of the pool, and you vacuum that out of the waste, and it's good to go. He did it. He said it was amazing, and I have not heard back from the guy. He was blown away by it.
[00:08:33] Eric Knight: If you look to your left, if you look down at my pool, you'll see, next to that waterfall, you see those piles of white dust? That's because I used PR-10,000 last night.
[00:08:41] Yeah, I put about four ounces in there. And it just fell right there because the circulation, at least on my timer clock, is 6 am to 6 pm. I did it right after 6 pm. So in 12 hours, I mean, it's clearly right there. I'll vacuum that later, but... Yeah, it doesn't matter. With all this foliage I have, these trees around...
[00:09:01] And then sometimes this hill here, I did this on Facebook live too, but this hill will run soil and it floods that drain and goes into my pool. Oh my gosh, I mean, I am constantly removing phosphates and every time I put PR cap test in, it blows up. Like, no matter what I do. By the way, there's over a thousand parts per billion phosphates in my tap water here.
[00:09:22] Which I have right now, turning on. So I'm adding phosphates as we're speaking, but there's nothing I can do about it.
[00:09:28] Dennis Ingram: I believe there's phosphates in a lot of water supplies.
[00:09:33] Eric Knight: Because of Flint, Michigan. Basically, the EPA mandated that, after the Flint, Michigan crisis, that you have to do anti corrosion measures.
[00:09:43] And the best one known is phosphate based sequestering agents, basically. And I don't know the exact chemicals used, I think it's a phosphoric acid of some kind. But it prevents corrosion in the pipes, which is good! And it sequesters metals, which is really good, because you can filter them out. So it's good for our health, it's good for our lawns, it's good for our dogs. It's just really bad for pools.
[00:10:03] And, uh, removing them is an important thing. But, you know, we're a phosphate remover company. So take my bias for what it is, but you know what? It's our podcast. So,
[00:10:14] Dennis Ingram: well, I mean, one thing I've seen too on commercial pools and they're having phosphates, you know, introduced into their water supply.
[00:10:19] So I you can only imagine their, uh, evaporation loss and splash out and everything else. They're putting a lot of water in a day to maintain the water level. And they're putting phosphates in there.
[00:10:29] You're fighting it constantly. I've seen a lot of these indoor pools that have a, like a wall of glass, you know, so it lets out outdoor light in. Well, guess what? You got sun coming through that glass, and you got UV, and so they're getting algae on indoor pools, so they're freaking out, going, what do we do? So, you know, we've done the phosphate treatments, but when it's just a constant battle like that, I have, uh, suggested that they go and put UV treatments on their windows.
UV
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[00:10:54] Dennis Ingram: So they're kind of basically tinting the windows, if you will. I mean, there's UV treatment that you don't have to go too dark with, and that seems to be helping. Yeah, cutting back on UV.
[00:11:05] Eric Knight: And we actually will be writing an article about this. It's funny you bring that up. Because I had the same question about an indoor pool that had it and glass blocks most UVA and UVB rays.
[00:11:16] But it's actually UVC rays that algae can use for photosynthesis. I did not know that. I'm learning as I go. That's what glass doesn't block very well. So yes, tinting the windows makes a huge difference. And has that helped?
[00:11:30] Dennis Ingram: Absolutely. The couple of facilities that we were really struggling with trying to help them out, I mean, it was to the point where the health department were wanting to shut them down because they had algae in the pool.
[00:11:42] So that was an expense they just had to do because, I mean, it was just, like I said, it was an uphill battle fighting that all the time with all the phosphates they kept putting in daily. You can only put in so much phosphate remover because you know will affect the filter if you're not careful if you overdo it. So that's definitely helped for sure.
[00:12:01] Eric Knight: Especially if you have a DE filter like one of these regenerative high end DE filters. You have to time the phosphate treatment because it will jam up that filter. You have to almost bypass that filter to get it enough time to settle out and then vacuum to waste.
[00:12:14] So I wish there was a simpler work routine around it, but for right now there isn't.
LSI in commercial pools
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[00:12:20] Eric Knight: We talk a lot at Orenda about the Langelier Saturation Index, the LSI. The balance of water. And I think for most people, at least, I don't know if it's the case with you, but most people learned this recently. They learned it from us, even though we didn't make it up. It came out in the thirties.
[00:12:35] How often are you and your pool operators that you deal with utilizing the app or just the LSI in general? And how has it changed how you actually approach like, for instance, you might want more calcium. Some people would freak out. They say it's 200 to 400 in the textbook. We don't want higher than that.
[00:12:52] But almost every pool I've been to that you guys run, it's way over 400 intentionally. How has that affected how you treat water and how you coach your customers to treat their water?
[00:13:04] Dennis Ingram: I don't generally worry too much about the calcium until we have issues. I mean, thanks to you and your app, you know, I use it all the time. So that's a big deal. And a lot of times customers, I really hadn't dealt with that much or whatever. And I tell everybody about the app as well.
[00:13:20] We go out and they're having issues. And of course, the first thing out of my mouth, if they're having an issue, I'm like, what's your chemical balance? You know, oh, it's all good. It's awesome.
[00:13:33] Eric Knight: Yeah. Yeah. That's always what they say. Oh, my chemicals are great!
[00:13:35] Dennis Ingram: Yeah. Can you give me a number? You know, that's what I asked for. Give me a number. And then, uh, uh, well, I'm like, well, go test it. You know, but, uh, or I'll say, what's, what's your LSI? Uh, what's that? You know, I mean, they don't have a clue. And I'm like, all right.
[00:13:48] So, but yeah, that was, uh, it's definitely been an eye opener. It's, it's, it's major. I mean, everybody, every pool I go to, I tell them about the app. Because it just makes life so much easier for them to see what's going on, you know. And to keep it balanced. And the ones that, like I said, you can tell the people that balance their pools versus the people that don't. You go into an old pool and it looks great, you go into a new pool, it looks horrible. proofs in the pudding.
[00:14:11] Eric Knight: Yeah, that's why I bring up the fact that I want to try an SC-1000 program on one of these pools, because if they are having scale, it tells me the operator probably isn't driving on the LSI like they could be.
[00:14:22] Maybe they do have too much alkalinity, or they do need to run longer backwashes. I don't know. I'm not there. But it'd be an interesting experiment to do. Is there anything you'd like to add about water chemistry from your experience for our audience before we wrap this up?
pH and alkalinity - overdosing acid feeders
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[00:14:36] Dennis Ingram: The two major things that I have found is pH and alkalinity. And a lot of people, you know, they go check their chlorine and their pH is all they worry about. Alkalinity has got such a big part of this because if you balance your pH and your alkalinity, your chlorine usually does what it's supposed to do.
[00:14:54] But if you're just checking your pH and your chlorine and you let the alkalinity get out of control, you know, I've seen it. Especially if you're on automation. The controller does not know what it is. You know, you have to keep it balanced. That's one thing I'm always like, make sure you check the alkalinity at least once a week, if not more. Just to make sure you keep it in check.
[00:15:13] Eric Knight: That's great advice because like you said, the controllers have no mechanism of knowing what the alkalinity is. Although some controllers are trying different things now, there's some new technologies. I guess they're in their early phases, I will say, but they show some promise. If a controller doesn't know what the alkalinity is, it doesn't actually have any ability to know how much to dose. Because the acid dose completely depends on the alkalinity, and we talk about that a lot.
[00:15:37] It's much easier in a residential pool when you test it once a week as a pool pro. You know what your alkalinity is, you plug it into the calculator, it tells you to fractions of an ounce how much acid you should measure, dilute, and pour.
[00:15:48] Automation doesn't do that. It's more like a thermostat where, okay, well, the pH is too high. I'm going to feed acid until the probe reads that the pH is down. Well, if you've got 80 feet of pipe between you and the pool, that's a lot of acid in there, and then it's a time delay. And these systems chronically overfeed.
[00:16:05] I'm optimistic that the technology is getting better, that we can learn more about what that alkalinity is, so that it ideally will send a prescribed amount of acid and just stop feeding. Let it mix, have plenty of time.
[00:16:19] And some of these advanced technologies, I won't use brand names, but some of them have proportional feeds, and they slow down intentionally to allow for more mixed times. And that's awesome. Especially on residential pools. Those automation protocols are getting better and better and better every single year.
[00:16:35] I look forward to getting one on my pool. But you know, in a commercial pool, you don't have the luxury of doing what I've done in my pool, which is to prove a point. I haven't added a drop of acid in my pool since I turned it from green to blue. May 14th. That was the last time I added any acid because I needed to lower the pH to get calcium and bicarb in this pool, on separate ends of the pool.
[00:16:56] I thought, you know, using the pH ceiling, using physics that we actually display as a secondary reading on our calculator, I had a theory. We could do this entire summer with no acid.
[00:17:08] And buddy, we have. Rain knocks it down naturally a little bit here and there. But I have not had to add a single drop of acid all summer and my pH never went over its pH ceiling I never etched this pool. I'm very happy with it.
[00:17:25] Dennis Ingram: What? What is your alkalinity?
[00:17:27] Eric Knight: It's in the 50s. So I aimed it for 50 and there is some alkalinity in my tap water. It's about 40 parts per million. And if I remember right I'd have to test it again, because you know, these things change over time. But yeah, it's in the 50s. Somewhere between 50 and 60, five and six drops on the test kit. And it stays there. And I have about 400 calcium and I've documented everything.
[00:17:48] I'm about to winterize this pool. I'm going to load up my calcium to about 500. And I'm going to keep the alkalinity where it is. I'm going to keep the pH at its ceiling, and I'm not going to get any crystals this winter.
[00:17:57] Dennis Ingram: What's your pH?
[00:18:00] Eric Knight: My pH is, it stays at its ceiling of 8.02. Now that may be slightly off if my, you know, I had rain the other day. Maybe, wait, say that again?
[00:18:11] Dennis Ingram: You can't do that in a commercial pool.
[00:18:13] Eric Knight: I know that's why I'm bringing it up. See, I have the luxury of being able to do things in the backyard. I can rule my pool the way I want to rule it. You can't do that. Commercial pool operators can't do that because of the standards. So you have to have a minimum of 60 alkalinity, which, by the way, it depends on the state.
[00:18:28] So the PHTA standards can go down to an acceptable level of 60 at the minimum.
[00:18:32] Dennis Ingram: Honestly, I don't know that they check the alkalinity a lot, but the pH and the chlorine is the two majors.
[00:18:37] Eric Knight: And the reason for that is chlorine strength is directly determined by pH when there's no CYA in the water. On an outdoor pool with CYA, that goes out the window.
[00:18:48] But on an indoor pool, absolutely pH matters. And so I would advocate on an indoor pool to have a 60 alkalinity. Be right at the minimum. 60 alkalinity, or 60 something, not 80. And it's going to reduce the amount of acid required to maintain that lower pH to have effective chlorine.
[00:19:03] Dennis Ingram: I've seen that. One of our large pools, we were struggling keeping it up. So actually I'll let the, the alkalinity get a little lower. So it's been a little easier to maintain the pH in it actually. So
[00:19:20] Eric Knight: it works well.
[00:19:21] Dennis Ingram: Yeah. Not having to put very much in there.
Closing
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[00:19:24] Eric Knight: Anything else you want to add?
[00:19:26] Dennis Ingram: I think we've covered it.
[00:19:28] Eric Knight: Dennis Ingram, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for all you do. And we will continue to work together and try to progress the technologies that we're working on, I guess. Thank you for your valuable insight. And this has been episode 126 of the rule your pool podcast. No idea what we're talking about next, but if you have questions or suggestions for episodes, reach out. It's podcast@orendatech.com. I'm your host, Eric Knight with Orenda, take care.